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When Angela Johnson is having a bad day, she’ll walk from her office in the corporate center to Children’s Hospital across the street. “I literally will go walk the floors of the hospital. The perspective I get when I go across that street and realize what’s going on over there smacks me in the face,” says Johnson, chief information security officer and acting chief information officer at Children’s Wisconsin.
Those introspective walks reinvigorate Johnson and remind her to do her best work to ensure the children receiving care—many suffering from life-threatening diseases—“get the heck out of that place and go back to being healthy and enjoying their life. All the things they deserve to have,” Johnson says. Every discharged child is a win. That’s what drives her and fills her heart.
Johnson runs the entire information security operation at Children’s Wisconsin, including all applications, infrastructure, security, project management, traditional IT departments, and business continuity. Using a patient-first approach, Johnson prioritizes the tech that gets patients home the fastest. “All those tools that help our physicians, nurses, and care providers get kids well faster,” Johnson says.
Operating under the philosophy that individuals recover faster at home, Johnson partners with other experts in the health system to enable Children’s health professionals to monitor patients’ progress remotely. For example, the nasal bridle, a nasogastric tube inserted through the nose, down the throat, and into the stomach, delivers nutrition directly to newborns while monitoring their feeding habits and growth at home. Through this device, the parents can remain in constant remote contact with the care team.
“We don’t need them in the hospital to watch how they’re growing,” Johnson says.“When you have a baby that young, you don’t have to take them outside into the inclement weather, bring them to the hospital, and expose them to whatever they might have in the hospital. They can just do it from home and allow them to recover better and faster.”
The goal is to treat sick kids. Technology is merely one of the “levers” providers pull to achieve that goal. “Everyone feels they are dependent on technology, but it should never be the only way you get there. It’s just part of the way you get there,” Johnson says. For example, physicians can use technology to prescribe the most effective medications, using genomics as a guide rather than trial and error.
Johnson insists that individuals need not be tech savvy to work in IT. “Everyone has their own lens,” she says. By its nature, IT has innumerable problems needing resolution, and the more lenses she can throw at the problem, the better her chances of finding a solution. “Zeros and ones are cool,” she says, but she deals with a range of procedural and communication problems too. “Having people with varying backgrounds leads to a better IT team overall.”
“We don’t need [newborns] in the hospital to watch how they’re growing … They can just do it from home and allow them to recover better and faster.”
Angela Johnson
When hiring, Johnson opens the process to candidates from a variety of backgrounds. She’s confident she can teach the tech, but not communication or people skills. “You’re either a people person or you’re not,” she says. “Having people show up with natural abilities that are different from what the usual technology person might have is valuable to me.”
Johnson’s journey to IT security and healthcare began in supply chain. “When I started out, IT security was not a thing. Supply chain was the big thing,” she says.
In 2004, Johnson landed a job with Metavante, a financial services company. An executive brought her down into the data center and asked her if she could “protect this stuff.” She wasn’t sure but she took on the task nonetheless. “I fell in love with the blinking lights and all the amazing things that happened in a data center. I thought to myself, this is what I want to do for a living,” she says. She tapped engineers and architects for their expertise and eventually designed, engineered, and built a data center. “It kind of grew from there,” she says.
People often ask Johnson why she chose healthcare. Her response? “It’s not just healthcare. It’s pediatric healthcare. I don’t know that I would feel as fulfilled in an adult healthcare system as I do in a pediatric healthcare system.”
Working with a leader like Angela Johnson has been a pleasure for our Cisco Team. She is always looking for ways to improve outcomes for Patients, Families, Providers, Employees and others that interact with the Children’s Wisconsin System.
With her guidance and our collaboration efforts, Cisco has implemented solutions that help address some of those outcomes. 1. Security and highly available networking solutions to protect critical data. 2. New cloud contact center with integration into EPIC and Work Force Optimization systems. 3. Video Conferencing systems to help ensure key stakeholders have high quality interactions.
Angela is always open to hear other ideas from Cisco and we are always open to see how we can help with items they bring to us, which helps make this a great partnership. Cisco looks forward to helping create additional valued outcomes in the future.
